THL Online Essay Editor Manual

Contributor(s): David Germano, Steven Weinberger

Overview

A WYSIWYG (“What You See Is What You Get”) rich text editor is provided to type in the instruction, which means that you can apply things like bold face, lists, and so forth with simple controls and edit while viewing the actual formatted content rather than having to see the underlying codes. The top gray header of the editing box has a series of controls represented by icons which give short labels when you hover your cursor over the icon. It is used in the following THL applications, all of which have their own editorial manuals in general:

We suggest that you prepare your text offline in a word processor, and then when complete, copy and paste it into the editor and add any extra formatting you need therein. You can always come back later and edit online. Please note that you can copy and paste directly from WORD into the WYSIWYG editor and it will preserve header styles, list styles, and formatting such as italic, bold, and underline. Therefore, if you know how to use styles, it is easiest and most efficient to apply the heading styles, styles for lists, and formatting such as bold, italic, and so forth in the Word document, and then copy and paste this into the WYSIWYG editor. If for some reason the text is garbled when you do this, delete all the text you pasted into the editor, hit the cancel button, and then open the editor again, copy the text again from the Word doc, and paste it into the editor. If the text is still garbled, then use the “paste from Word” button (the icon is a blue W) on the toolbar in the WYSIWYG editor, and paste the text you copied from your Word file into the window that opens when you click the “paste from Word” button. It will strip the entry of that code, but still try to preserve the formatting.

When editing descriptions, we suggest using the “fullscreen mode,” which devotes the entire browser window to the text entry box. You can toggle this mode off and on by clicking on the first button in the toolbar, which is a blue icon of a monitor. Please note that you cannot save in the fullscreen mode, and you will have to toggle it off in order to save. Once you are finished, or in order to save your work, click on the “Create” button at the bottom; once created, in the future you must click on the “Update” button to save. Please note that there is no saving as you type, and so you are strongly advised to periodically click update and then open up for editing again if you are working on an entry online for an extended period of time. Otherwise you risk losing any unsaved work if something goes.

When writing general descriptions, please do your best to make them accessible to a broad audience by giving necessary context to your statements.

Dealing with Tibetan Terms

When writing in a European language, please refer to Tibetan place names, personal names, and terms in Tibetan with easy to pronounce simplified phonetics that follow the THL Simplified Phonetics System (which is keyed to Standard Tibetan pronunciation) or a similar simplified form relevant to the region in question if that form is known and significantly different from THL Simplified Phonetics System (for example, using simplified Amdo pronunciation for that region). The THL Extended Wylie transcription should be given in parentheses on the first occurrence only of each Tibetan word, and the Wylie should be in italics. Do NOT capitalize the initial letter of the Wylie except in very rare cases (for details, see the Wylie Transliteration System section below ). For all subsequent occurrences of that word in the essay, enter only the phonetics. If you are using a non-standard Tibetan phonetic version of a Tibetan term in the essay, then the first occurrence of the term should also indicate what the THL Simplified Phonetics form is using this format: "Huaré (dpa'i ris, Pari in Standard Tibetan pronunciation)."

For a Tibetan term that is not a personal name, place name, organization name, text title, etc., give the phonetics with the Wylie in parentheses, but apply the TIB style to the Wylie and NOT to the phonetics.

For Tibetan text titles and Tibetan terms, we ask that you provide a translation. In such cases, the formatting is slightly different.

Text Title at the first occurrence, enter the translation followed by the Wylie in parentheses. Do not add phonetics. Highlight the translation and click the TXT button to apply the text title style. Highlight the Wylie and click the I button to make it italics. For all subsequent occurrences of the text title in the essay, enter just the translation.

Term at the first occurrence, enter the translation followed by the Wylie in parentheses. Do not add phonetics. Highlight the Wylie and click the TIB button to apply the Tibetan term style. For all subsequent occurrences of the term in the essay, enter just the translation.

We have an online converter to generate THL Simplified Phonetics – see http://www.thlib.org/reference/transliteration/phconverter.php. Make sure to set word splitting to use “syllables in a word joined by” and make it a hyphen (or whatever). Then type in the Wylie or Tibetan, indicating syllables you want to be joined into a single word with that mark. Also specify the phonetic system as “THL Simplified Phonetic Transcription.”

Our plan is to link those items to these Tibetan terms to THL entries on them, such that people can follow the links to find out the proper spelling, as well as other information. See below for the way this is done. In the meantime, you should either put the THL Wylie transliteration in parentheses the first time the Tibetan name/term is mentioned, or attach a description that is entitled “A Glossary of Cited Tibetan Names & Terms.” It should given the phonetic term cited in the description, and the corresponding Tibetan term in Tibetan script with a Unicode font or Wylie. We will then process the glossary later to link these names/terms to the corresponding entries.

Standard Editor Buttons

The following is a full list of all buttons on the rich text editor toolbar apart from the THL custom buttons in the order that they appear:

Undo: undoes whatever action you just did; can also invoke through keystroke Ctrl+z.

Redo: redoes whatever action you just undid with the undo action; can also invoke through keystroke Ctrl+y.

Insert/edit link:

Unlink:

Insert predefined template content:

Select style: this enables you to select headers for section; use heading one for your top level sections; heading two for sub-sections; heading three for sub-sub-sections, and so forth.

HTML: this gives you an editing window that shows you the underlaying code, which is helpful if something goes wrong with the rich text editor and you need to delete some stray code.

Cut: cuts the selected text.

Copy: copies the selected text.

Paste: pastes in the selected text.

Paste as plain text:

Paste from Word: always, always use this if you are pasting in from Word to avoid garbage code coming into the Place Dictionary from Word and creating many problems.

Unordered List: formats selected text into a bulletted list.

Ordered List: formats selected text into a bulletted list.

Outdent: only is active if the selected text is indented; each time you apply it, it removes one level of indentation until finally the text is flush with the margin again.

Indent: indents the selected text; each time you apply it, it indents the text further.

Align Left: aligns selected text to the left margin.

Align Center: centers the selected text.

Align Right: aligns selected text to the right margin.

Remove Formatting: removes any formatting like bold, etc. from the selected text.

Insert Custom Character: this gives you a popup of unusual characters you can choose to insert into your text.

Inserts a new table:

Table row properties:

Table cell properties:

Insert row before:

Insert row after:

Delete row:

Insert column before:

Insert column after:

Remove column:

Split merged table cells:

Merge table cells:

THL Custom Tagging Buttons

Special note should be made of the THL custom buttons on the bottom of the tool bar. These are buttons that connect specific terms to THL resources on those terms, whether another place, a Tibetan term, a map, a person, or other type of item. In case, you highlight the term, click on the button, and a popup asks you for the ID. You then type in the ID for that item from the relevant THL repository and hit ok. If you don’t have the ID for some reason, you can just click on OK without entering an ID. Later in 2010, we will have this fully implemented so that the program will use that ID to make the term directly hyperlinked to the corresponding THL page. If you have not inserted an ID, it will instead use the term to make a search of the relevant THL database and show the search results. Thus it is always better to insert the ID to make sure the hyperlink is correct.

USE OF THESE IS NOT REQUIRED – ADMITTEDLY IT CAN BE TEDIOUS. The benefit is all terms are then automatically hyperlinked to their own descriptions.

The full list:

EVT: event. This is for reference to an event description found in the THL Event Dictionary. This is not yet online and is scheduled for activation in the summer 2010.

HIM: Himalayan language term. This is for reference to a term from any Himalayan language other than Tibetan as found in the THL Himalayan Dictionaries. This is not yet online and is scheduled for activation in April 2010.

ORG: organization. This is for reference to a contemporary organization found in the THL’s Tibetan & Himalayan Connections social networking application. This is not yet online and is scheduled for activation in May 2010.

PER: person. This is for reference to a contemporary person found in the THL’s Tibetan & Himalayan Connections social networking application. This is not yet online and is scheduled for activation in May 2010.

PLA: place. This is for reference to a place found in the THL Place Dictionary. This can be found at http://places.thlib.org/

PRO: project. This is for reference to a contemporary project found in the THL’s Tibetan & Himalayan Connections social networking application. This is not yet online and is scheduled for activation in May 2010.

REF: reference. This is for reference to a image, video, immersive object, text, or website catalog entry as found in THL’s MMS application. This is not yet online and is scheduled for activation in April 2010.

TOP: topic. This is for reference to a category found in the THL Knowledge Maps. This can be found online at http://tmb.thlib.org/.

SOURCES

We are currently working at integrating THL's bibliography program into the online essay composition system. In the meantime, if you want to have a sources section, please put the word "Sources" at the end of your text, and before any possible "Notes" section. Make it a header 1, and then list out the relevant sources.

FORMATTING OF TEXT

Quotation Marks and Apostrophes

Quotation marks and apostrophes should be “smart quotes” (that is, the curvy single and double quotes, such as “ ” ‘ ’) rather than straight single and double quotes (" ') for all text except when using Wylie. When typing with the Wylie transliteration scheme, use a straight single quote (') to represent the letter འ (a chung). When typing on an internet browser, smart quotes do not appear automatically, so it is best to type content in a word processor (like Microsoft Word) first, then carefully paste them into the editing interface.

Wylie Transliteration System

Tibetan words given in Wylie transcription should NEVER be capitalized (even if it is a proper noun or if it comes at the beginning of a sentence) unless the letter in question is representing a long vowel (ex: nA ro pa), a retroflex or otherwise uncommon letter (ex: maN+Dal).

Italics

When giving italic words that are in parentheses, be careful not to italicize the parentheses themselves. Thus you would enter: (pramāṇa), not (pramāṇa).

Endnotes/Footnotes

Unfortunately, there is no automated way to nicely create endnotes or footnotes. However if you want them, there is a manual way to do so.

Unfortunately, this system does not automatically resequence the footnote numbering, so that if you later add a footnote in the middle, then all your numbering will be off. At present, we can only offer two solutions to this:

go through and manually renumber all footnotes in both the body of the essay and in the notes section at the bottom. This is the best solution, but really only practical if you just have a couple of footnotes. Otherwise it is very tedious.

Inserting new notes: if you insert a new note after, for example, footnote 2 in a document that already has many footnotes, call the new note "2a" so that you don't have to renumber all the subsequent footnotes.

Here are the instructions for manually inserting footnotes into your document:

Click the Edit button to edit the description

In the rich text editor toolbar, click on the “HTML” button, which is at the right end of the top row. This will open a new window showing the description with the HTML markup. Don’t be alarmed by all the angle brackets!

Go to the point in the text where you want to insert the footnote.

Insert: <a name="n1" href="#fn1">[1]</a>, where "1" represents the footnote number

Do this for all the footnotes in the body of the text, substituting the appropriate note number. For example, for note 2: <a name="fn2" href="#n2">[2]</a>

Then after the end of the text, insert a line that says: <h1 class="Paragraph">Notes</h1>

Then you need to insert the corresponding footnote reference in the footnote section, which begins right after the "Notes" header

Do this for all the footnotes in the footnote section, substituting the appropriate note number. For example, for note 2: <p><a name="fn2" href="#n2">[2]</a> INSERT HERE THE ACTUAL TEXT OF THE FOOTNOTE</p>

Click the “Update” button at the bottom of the html editor window.

This will take you back to the WYSIWYG editor window. Click the “Update” bottom for that window.

If the description you just edited is not open, open it by clicking on the plus sign next to it

Test to make sure when you click on the footnote number in the body of the text it jumps to the footnote itself, and when you click on the footnote number in the footnote it jumps to the footnote in the body of the text. Do this for each footnote to make sure they all work.

If you are interested in an explanation of the HTML markup: the principle is that in an <a> tag, the value of the name attribute is an anchor point; when you create another <a> tag with the attribute href="#+value of a name element in another <a> tag", it creates a link to the <a> tag with the name element you specified after the #.

Endnotes/Footnotes with Microsoft Word

When you paste text into the WYSIWYG editor from a Word document, you can paste in footnotes also. The editor will preserve the formatting, including the line at the bottom of the page that divides the body of the Word doc from the footnotes.

You then need to manually reformat the notes, following this procedure:

Save the description

Click the Edit button to edit the description

In the rich text editor toolbar, click on the “HTML” button, which is at the right end of the top row. This will open a new window showing the description with the HTML markup. Don’t be alarmed by all the angle brackets!

The first footnote number in the body of the text should be inside square brackets [ ]. To find it, do control-f (Windows) or command-f (Mac) to activate the search box, and then type in [1] and hit enter

You will find that there is some html code around the footnote number. It should look something like this: <a href="#_ftn1">[1]</a>

Edit the markup so it looks like this: <a name="n1" href="#fn1">[1]</a>

Do control-f (Windows) or command-f (Mac) to activate the search box. [1] should still be the text in the search box; if it is not, type it in. Then hit enter.

The cursor should now be somewhere close to the bottom of the text in the window, having located the corresponding footnote in the footnote section. You will see some html markup around [1], which should look like this: <a href="#_ftnref1">[1]</a>. Edit the markup so it looks like this: <a name="fn1" href="#n1">[1]</a>

Do this for all the footnotes in the body of the text and the footnote section of the text, substituting the appropriate note number. For example, for note 2, search on [2]. In the body of the text, replace the markup with this: <a name="n2" href="#fn2">[2]</a>; in the footnote section, replace the markup with this: <a name="fn2" href="#n2">[2]</a>

Click the “Update” button at the bottom of the html editor window.

This will take you back to the WYSIWYG editor window. Click the “Update” bottom for that window.

If the description you just edited is not open, open it by clicking on the plus sign next to it

Test to make sure when you click on the footnote number in the body of the text it jumps to the footnote itself, and when you click on the footnote number in the footnote it jumps to the footnote in the body of the text. Do this for each footnote to make sure they all work.